The Common Perception of Juvenile Offenders Essay

The Common Perception of Juvenile Offenders - Essay Example The Certain reason for it cannot be distinguished strictly. Presumably such behavior is encouraged with the stereotypes, common for police and jurors and is rooted in the past where the slavery and beliefs of blacks being not as clever as whites and much more aggressive were wide-spread. Mass-media is also likely to influence such point of view, describing the evil nature of Black juvenile offenders and the misguided yet still innocent nature of White juvenile offenders ». Thus shooting at school committed by a white adolescent would most likely be described as shocking, while same act committed by a black one - as expectable. There are no special explorations of for reasons of juvenile legal discrimination, but similar tests were conducted with adults and resulted in the theory of similarity-leniency, where people tend to show more empathy with ones whom they consider alike to their person. That was not the first experiment of a kind, still it was the first one conducted in order to prove the existence of racial prejudice directed onto coloured juveniles. The confinement of African American juveniles throughout the United States is abnormal. The rate of juvenile confinements for several years has decreased, and thus the predominance of arrests of coloured juveniles has become even more obvious. According to researches, coloured youth commits more crimes and is arrested twice as often as white juveniles. Still, the other reason for such misbalance was also caused by the difference in attitude to black or latin juveniles in comparison to white ones. It is bound not only with the biased attitude but also with the difference in the life circumstances of juveniles that result in stricter sentences. For example under the law of Minnesota, a punishment for trying crack cocaine is four years of confinement, while trying powdered cocaine leads only to probation period.